BIRDS AND MAN.* THE world is divided into those to
whom what Mr. Hudson calls " the life and conversation of animals " is a matter of lively interest, and those for whom the animal world may be said hardly to exist. The latter half of the public will not care for Mr. Hudson's book, the former will be enchanted by it. By the by, we ought to say that the book is not altogether new. It is a new edition of one which has been several years out of print. Two new chapters have been added, and " some fresh matter introduced throughout the work." The charm of Mr. Hudson's writing for his many, many admirers is like the charm of the song of birds for Mr. Hudson. It is not easy to define, but it resembles the charm of Nature, not the charm of Art. Mr. Hudson listens to the voices of English birds with a keenness of delight perhaps not possible in such a high degree to a man brought up in England :—
" On coming to this country I could not listen to the birds coldly as an English naturalist would to those of, let us say, Queensland, or Burma, or Canada, or Patagonia, but with an intense interest ; for these were the birds which my forbears had known and listened to all their lives long ; and my imagination was fired by all that had been said of their charm, not indeed by frigid ornithologists, but by a long succession of great poets, from Chaucer down to those of our own time. Hearing them thus emotionally their notes became permanently impressed on my mind, and I found myself the happy possessor of a large number of sound-images representing the bird language of two widely separated regions."
Mr. Hudson is not scornful about " the indoor view of life." He seems, like most people who are strongly under the influence of Nature and in strong sympathy with animals, to be without the quality of scorn. He puts the " indoor " side very well :—
" Birds, for instance : apart from the interest which the ornitholo- gist must take in his subject, what substantial happiness can be got out of these shy creatures, mostly small and not too well seen, that fly from us when approached, and utter sounds which at their best • Birds and Man. By W. H. Hudson. London : Duckworth and Co. Me. net.)
are so poor, so thin, so trivial, compared with our soul-stirring human music 1" Mr. Hudson lets some one else answer his imaginary critic, and that some one else is, oddly enough, a statesman :-
" Some five or six years ago I heard a speech about birds delivered by Sir Edward Grey, in which he said that the love and appreciation and study of birds was something fresher and brighter than the second-hand interests and conventional amusements in which so many in this day try to live ' • that the pleasure of seeing and listening to them was purer and more lasting than any pleasures of excitement, and, in the long run, ' happier than personal success.' "
It is probable, continues Mr. Hudson, that some who heard this saying " failed to understand." Yes, most of us can only understand in part or understand only at moments. It is partly a question of memory, a question of the " faculty of preserving impressions of Nature for long years or to the end of life in all their original freshness." Our author has this faculty. He cannot give a reader the seeing eye, but he can revive and make permanent the faded picture. He seems to be able to illuminate that " dark and hard " saying of Sir Edward Grey's, to be able to throw his " treasured images at will into the mind of another," to show him " as by a swift succession of lightning flashes a score or a hundred images of birds at their best—the unimagin- able loveliness, the sunlit colour, the grace of form and of motion, and the melody." Mr. Hudson has the gift that he longs for.
Happy man !
Let 'us leave the poetic heights and come down to the farm- yard. Mr. Hudson's heart goes out even to geese—so, oddly enough, did Cowper's. " All the sounds that Nature utters are delightful, at least in this country," the poet writes. He makes only one exception—the braying of a donkey. " I should not think of keeping a goose in a cage that I might hank him up in the parlour for the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a common or in a farmyard is no bad performer." Mr. Hudson will not make even Cowper's exception. He has lived where " semi-wild asses roamed over the plains," and he found that their braying " at a distance had a wild expression that accorded with the scene." Geese are very intelligent birds. Why is it that, like donkeys, who are also very clever, their name conveys a reproach of stupidity ? Mr. Hudson tells an amusing story of the cleverness of a " common " goose, and then gives the following beautiful instance of love stronger than instinct, as shown in a.
wild pair. The scene our author depicts took place in Buenos Ayres. The upland geese depart in great flocks as the weather gets too hot for them. The mass of them had gone when Mr.
Hudson's brother, as he was riding,
" saw at a distance before him on the plain a pair of geese. They were male and female—a white and a brown bird. Their movements attracted his attention and he rode to them. The female was walking steadily on in a southerly direction, while the male, greatly excited, and calling loudly from time to time, walked at a distance ahead, and constantly turned back to see and call to his mate, and at intervals of a few minutes he would rise up and fly, screaming, to a distance of some hundreds of yards ; then, finding that he had not been followed, he would return and alight at a distance of forty or fifty yards in advance of the other bird, and begin walking on as before. The female had one wing broken, and, unable to fly, had set out on her long journey to the Magellanic Islands on her feet ; and her mate, though called to by that mysterious imperative voice in his breast, yet would not forsake her ; but, flying a little distance to show her the way, and returning again and again, and calling to her with his wildest and most piercing cries, urged her still to spread her wings and fly with him to their distant home. And in that sad, anxious way they would journey on to the inevitable end, when a, pair or family of carrion eagles would spy them from a great distance —the two travellers left far behind by their fellows, one flying, the other walking ; and the first would be left to continue the journey alone."
The " wild, glad, mad cries of wild parrots " in their native lands give pleasure to Mr. Hudson, and he tells some interesting stories of the domestic " Polly." He mentions in passing that parrots, in common with all the birds preyed upon by hawks, exhibit great fear at the sight of falling feathers. He knows of one parrot who was terrified at her first experience of snow ; she saw it through the window and was wild with fear. She was not the first to notice the likeness between snow and feathers. The " old woman plucking her geese " is well known in every nursery. On the whole, our author is less favourable to the parrot's intelligence and charm than are most bird-lovers, admitting, however, that certain captive parrots have power
to win his heart. We are all too apt, as he points out, to forget that among animals as among men it is not species only but individuals who differ. Every nightingale does not sing as certain nightingales of genius sing. It is not enough to belong to a race. Is every naturalist or every man of letters a Mr, Hudson ?
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